This fine baseball history tells the story of the National League pennant race of 1951, when the New York Giants came from 13 1/2 games back with just 6 weeks to go to overtake the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the pennant. The regular season ended in a tie, resulting in a best-of-three playoff series to decide the victor. In the third and deciding game of that series, the Giants came to bat in the bottom of the 9th inning trailing by three runs, but won the game thanks to a home run by third baseman Bobby Thomson, one of the most famous and dramatic home runs in baseball history, known alternately as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" and "The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff." (The stadium the Giants played in, the Polo Grounds, was built below a rocky cliff in Harlem known as Coogan's Bluff.)

Thomas Kiernan, a life-long New York Giants fan who was just entering college in 1951, provides the story of that season through the eyes of the Giants. He gives effective pocket biographies of the team's important players and their manager, Leo Durocher. Happily, rather than giving a blow-by-blow account of every day of the season, he picks out important points in the campaign to focus in on and provides overall themes that he allows us to follow along with. Just often enough, he picks out particular games to describe in detail, with an eye toward understanding how a season that ended in a tie could have a multiplicity of key moments: a double play not turned, an easy grounder bobbled, a light-hitting backup player's unexpected home run. Also, he shows us the personalities of many of the players and explores the dynamic that allowed the team to coalesce into one that could pull off such an unlikely comeback.

That's the first half of the book. Kiernan was writing in the early 1970s (the book was published in 1975) or only about 22 years after the event. That meant he was able to track down many of the most important Giant players from the team and interview them at length. The second half of the book is a collection of those interviews, providing a Roshoman-type picture of the season, the final game, and even the famous final rally that culminated in Thompson's blast. For example, in that final inning, Giants infielder Alvin Dark, having led off with a single, was on first. Given that the Dodgers led by three, his run didn't mean anything. Yet the Dodgers' excellent first baseman, Gil Hodges, played close to first base to keep Dark from getting a good lead, leaving a hole the Giant Don Mueller hit a grounder through for another hit that might otherwise have been a double play. Was that a positioning blunder by Hodges? One or two Giants said yes. One said that Hodges should have made the play anyway, but that his view of the ball had been blocked momentarily by Dark cutting in front of him. Mueller himself said that he hit the ball there because he saw the hole, and would have gotten a hit in some other direction had Hodges been playing off the back. And so on.

In addition, a few of the players providde fascinating insights into the nature of baseball from a player's perspective. Giants first baseman Whitey Lockman, for example, explained his theory that both hitting and pitching come down to half-inch zones within the strike zone. The pitchers have their half inches that they're trying to put the ball in, and the hitters have their own half-inch zones in which they can make solid contact. Lockman says that if a ball is just a bit outside of one of his zones, muscle memory can take over and still allow him to be successful, but the further away the ball is from the zone, the less muscle memory can help him.

Kiernan had an unfortunate fixation on sussing out the underlying causation of the comeback and final Giants win. Was it divine providence? Luck? Destiny? The players seemed mostly amused by the question. Other than the religious Dark, who was sure he saw God's hand in the events,* most of the players said something like, "The Dodgers had the better players, but we were the more tight-knit team. They squabbled, we pulled together." Kiernan also had a penchant for the occasional cliched overwriting. Fast outfielders "lope gazellelike," for example. But mostly this is kept to a dull roar. Overall, especially due to the excellent set of player interviews, as noted above I found The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff a very good entry in the genre of baseball histories.

A note that all of the Giants players Kiernan talked to evidently kept the secret from him that the Giants had, in face, been stealing signs during their home games by posting someone in the scoreboard with a pair of binoculars. This went on during the entire second half of the season, but clearly nobody told Kiernan. It didn't come out until the Wall Street Journal ran a story about it in 2001.

* As for my agnostic self, if there indeed is a God, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he/she/they were a baseball fan. But I certainly hope that God isn't fixing ballgames. ( )